Are you ready for the Internet of Cops?

March 3, 2014

FirstNet — a state-of-the-art communications network for paramedics, firemen and law enforcement at the federal, state and local level — will give cops on the streets unprecedented technological powers, and possibly hand over even more intimate data about our lives to the higher ends of the government and its intelligence agencies, Motherboard reports.

FirstNet will allow users to “tag” a disaster victim with a small device to allow patients’ vital signs to be monitored from a control center, allowing medical staff to keep an eye on who needs treatment the most at any one time. But FirstNet will also give local law enforcement the ability to take digital “fingerprints from the field,” record and share high-quality video, with facial recognition, and instantaneously marry these freshly sourced data with others over the network.

The uses of FirstNet — biometric data gathering, license plate readers and high speed information sharing — are explicit aims of the project, as laid out in presentations and other documents, along with a possible “kill switch” to disable the civilian network in emergencies.

There is also the possibility that this will create a new means for the federal government to harvest massive quantities of the biometric data being collected by local agencies.

Webcam chats, gamers also surveilled

In related news last week, under a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve, Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, collected millions of still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, The Guardianreported. The agencies also collected gamers’ chats and deployed real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life.

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comments 27

If it’s true, I don’t understand why first responders would need a kill switch for civilian networks – I would think leaving those in place would reduce hysteria. I wonder if this a conspiracy-theory add-on to the story.

The whole story has a lot of innuendo and information holes. Was it really necessary to add the ‘related’ story, “Webcam chats, gamers also surveilled”? (surveilled=surveyed)

A friend of mine who is a CEO in the telecommunications industry explained the scam. The carriers are trying to roll out 4G services but they have to negotiate with individual property owners for the rental of towers on buildings and private land. By making this a “public safety issue” they can use eminent domain to put the towers where ever they want. FirstNet uses public money to build the towers (in many cases completely duplicating infrastructure that already exists which should put kickbacks in all the right pockets). Once the towers are built then the teleco providers can lease space cheaply on the towers that the tax payer just built and the telcos don’t have to negotiate with the individual landowners. The gov’t has been completely hijacked by organized crime and they get away with it because they own the six major media companies who are giving the population a false reality when not distracting them with children’s sports played by adults.

Funny, this “FirstWeb” concept seems so reasonable and familiar … because I remember reading, maybe last year, a good science-fiction novel about a near-future lady detective who, in essence, was provided standard “police issue” Google Glasses and as a result could see, check into, and work through a “First Web” as part of her ordinary daily duties. Darn it, I just can’t remember the title or author of this story (sorry about that) but the presence of that kind of “web” in the society of the story was no big deal. Pretty neat, actually.

Sorry but this article is rather lacking in context. First responders have used networked data for decades. How do you think a patrol officer finds out if someone has a record or not? Why do you think ambulances and police cars have computers? These systems are designed to save lives and protect people.

If you get hit by a car, it’s more than useful for first responders to be able to identify you, contact relatives, avoid allergies, and so forth. Also to be able to look up drug reactions. If you happen to be visiting another state, same thing. People die because of gaps in the network but that doesn’t make the news.

Yes, they are occasionally abused but the perps are punished. The abuse of the NSA is a distinct topic and is not universal to all law enforcement. This isn’t a new surveillance network. If we’re going to correct problems like the NSA, people need to be able to be informed enough to discriminate legitimate and inappropriate use of their personal information.

Once in New York he was thrown out of a bar for wearing his hat…seventeen years earlier he was arrested for public intoxication in a small Texas town where he had lived four houses up the street from the arresting officer.

He was asked if he had any aliases. So being a wise-ass seventeen-year-old, he answered, “…they call me tater salad…”

So after all this in Texas, 17 years later in NYC, a cop asked him, “Are you Ron ‘tater salad’ White?”

You know, systems like this are ripe for noise generation. Consider some of the issues Google Maps has with bad info. This is a 4G network, the protocols of which are fairly well known. It shouldn’t be too hard to gain access and increase the signal to noise ratio so that any surveillance is pretty much useless. Heck I’d imagine you could create bots that would spam the network for free.

This is just stupid. Open the system up to the public at large and let them share this information with the system at large. There are plenty of people who have cameras, apps and other devices to share information. By allowing people to voluntarily share this info and gaining the trust of the public you gain legitimacy as opposed to instant “big brother” concerns when you make the system secret and supposedly inaccessible.

The last month or so has been kinda krazee … More so than is usual even for me, though actually more good than bad. It sure is good to see you channeling your inner Robert A. Heinlein (and Philip K. Dick, for good measure) again. I wish I could be as clever as you stringing words together like that.

I’m sure the NSA (and other lesser known groups) can already easily hack these systems. It’ll be even easier for them when we’ve all had mandatory bio-chip implants and they’ve implanted their own secret sub-level electronics for complete monitoring & control.

(Simple alternative to save millions more lives and reduce crime? A balanced organic diet, some regular exercise and a 30 hour work week… But that’s too cheap and effective isn’t it)

But if I were eating organic carrots and radishes, I could only mug you all that much faster, buji…but not to worry…when you are on food stamps, you can’t afford the organic produce…only the the stuff that was protected from insects and weeds by insecticides and and herbicides. If it weren’t for Monsanto’s Round Up, I couldn’t even afford those fake hamburgers made from soy beans.

Without Round Up, I could not afford anything made of soy beans…not even Soylent Yellow.

Foodstuffs imported from Japan do tend to be very expensive. My cheaper simulation of katsuobushi would consist of a can of common supermarket tuna (ie., BumbleBee, SeaChicken, Starkist) marinated as long as desired in adequate Made-in-U.S.A. Kikkoman soy sauce (whenever I bring home sushi, I always save the packets of such soy sauce) and cook it up with seaweed and noodles. There is a really good Korean supermarket on the edge of Hicksville, near where I used to live. For several years I have been shopping for my East Asian staple foodstuffs there, learning something new and tasty every time I shop there. I particularly like their squid jerky, krill and seaweed.